perspectives from a journalist turned blogger

White Men Can’t Mow Lawns

How often have we heard it said by conservative pundits and talk radio personalities that unemployed Americans are inclined to refuse menial work, apparently content to accept government handouts? The list of supposed “shall nots” are numerous: Americans won’t bus tables, clean hotel rooms, harvest crops and, in general, bust our chops. On the flip side, how many times have liberals argued that undocumented labor has little to no adverse impact on American job prospects?

Never mind the reality: The bulk of today’s job growth takes place in the service sector — precisely where the legal and undocumented alike mingle.

But what does one make of it when “reality” is beholden to stereotypes — perceptions so routine, we scarcely question them?

A phenomena of “enforced roles” may help explain why socioeconomic groups become occupationally stratified.

“Jim’s” story provides a window into things present — and trends to come. It began when a middle-aged man and his parents began sharing a roof. The Great Recession had not been kind, having hit the state of California particularly hard. For Jim, the eldest son of retired healthcare professionals, the economic downturn entailed prolonged underemployment — in spite of experience in a supposedly in-demand field. Having hit his late 40s with a résumé that reads like a who’s-who of defunct employers, things weren’t looking up. For Jim’s parents, likewise, failure to pay off their primary residence before retirement forced a difficult choice: upend their son, or live under the same roof.

Like any earnest job-seeker, Jim sought to do “whatever it takes” to get by while searching for full-time work. Imagine, then, his surprise when his parents turned down his offer to do yard work — lawn and garden care for the very home he occupied as his parents’ renter for nearly 20 years.

Why deny one’s own son a mundane job, an offer that if accepted would have netted a savings for a couple who themselves depend upon a fixed income — an offer that, if little more, would have helped a demoralized Jim feel useful? Their objection, Jim says, centered around the difficulty of finding a “good gardener”. And who might a good gardener be?

Too add insult to injury, Jim’s parents spend upwards of 10 hours per day watching FOX News. If anyone were to be opposed to undocumented labor, it would be them — right?

Wrong.

To add yet another layer of irony, it wasn’t the first time Jim had lost out on work he was more than willing to take. When a neighbor passed away before the recession, Jim kept up the vacant home’s yard while the trustees weighed their options. Upon noting Jim’s neighborly actions, the inheritors of the property began to pay him a small sum — fortuitously for by this time Jim’s employer had succumbed to the recession. The owners compensated Jim, that is until they inexplicably apologized for “taking advantage” of him, opting instead for — you guessed it — a gardening service run by those whom society has apparently come to regard as legitimate partakers of such labor.

Jim’s reality is a poor fit for conservative critics’ allegations of pervasive, American lassitude and laziness, nor does it jive with the liberal romanticism our nation of immigrants reserves for the newly arrived. More telling, it begs the question: Is there a double standard in society — a racist typecasting of sorts — that keeps ethnic minorities behind a barrier of subordinate or low-wage occupations and majority “whites” entrenched in roles of a different but no less rigid type?